Growing food

I was at an annual potluck this evening for the Asheville Buncombe Food Policy Council.  It's a new group for me, although I've tried to learn more about food systems, food security initiatives, etc. in my town of Asheville and county of Buncombe, as well as the Southeast, over the last couple of decades.

I've come home thinking a bit more about what it actually takes to grow food, something I think quite a bit about, actually. (Many of the folks brought commercially grown food for the potluck, not home-grown, as it turned out), although much of it was home-prepared.

It's fun to grow your own veggies (and fruit, too), but it can be really hard work on a community or market gardening scale.  And it's not without effort in my small-scale raised beds, either.

I covered my beets, chard, and spinach this afternoon, with perforated plastic and agrofabric.

Hard to know what the experiment of covering chard, spinach, and beets with floating covers might be!  It's going to be about 18°F overnight.

I'm hoping they'll pull through, but also would really enjoy eating some broccoli or Brussels sprouts from the market, truth be told.

I have a wonderful large bag of spinach, though, harvested from the lower beds.  It's the nicest looking spinach I've grown.  We'll enjoy the spinach over the next day or two!